A fraction of the most popular PC games over the past year use hardware-level ray tracing, which is far fewer than I'd predict just 24 months ago

There was a long period of time where the phrase 'ray tracing' was almost inescapable and slapped onto all the prettiest-looking games. However, as the memory crisis continues to devastate hardware prices, and game performance gets even more unpredictable, optimised games have become a real sign of a quality launch. And now, ray tracing is a bit of a rarity among the most popular new games.

Looking back at the last 12 months of the biggest games, I've spotted a mere handful that have ray tracing of any kind (optional or not)...